November 24, 2007

Part I - Cyberspace in the Life and Mission of the Church




1.1 Origin of the term

The word "cyberspace" (from cybernetics and space) was coined by science fiction novelist William Gibson in his 1982 story "Burning Chrome" and popularized by his 1984 novel Neuromancer. The prefix “cyber ” is much older, this word is clipped off from the word ‘cybernetics’, which comes from the Greek “kubernetes” meaning steersman or governor. The English term ‘cybernetics’ was borrowed by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener in the 1940s to mean the theory of control and communication processes.

The portion of Neuromancer cited in this respect is usually the following:
Cyberspace - A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

Gibson later commented on the origin of the term in the 1996 documentary No Maps for These Territories, “All I knew about the word "cyberspace" when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page”. Gibson also coined the phrase Meatspace for the physical world contrasted with Cyberspace.

1.1.1 Metaphorical Meaning
The term Cyberspace started to become a de facto synonym for the Internet, and later the World Wide Web, during the 1990s, especially in academic circles and activist communities. Author Bruce Sterling, who popularized this meaning, credits John Perry Barlow as the first to use it to refer to "the present-day nexus of computer and telecommunications networks." Barlow describes it thus in his essay to announce the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in June, 1990

John Perry Barlow, in his article Crime and Puzzlement says “In this silent world, all conversation is typed. To enter it, one forsakes both body and place and becomes a thing of words alone. You can see what your neighbours are saying or recently said, but not what either they or their physical surroundings look like. Town meetings are continuous and discussions rage on everything from sexual kinks to depreciation schedules. Whether by one telephonic tendril or millions, they are all connected to one another. Collectively, they form what their inhabitants call the Net. It extends across that immense region of electron states, microwaves, magnetic fields, light pulses and thought which sci-fi writer William Gibson named Cyberspace”.

1.1.2 Cyberspace as an Internet metaphor

While cyberspace should not be confused with the real Internet, the term is often used to refer to objects and identities that exist largely within the communication network itself, so that a web site, for example, might be metaphorically said to "exist in cyberspace." According to this interpretation, events taking place on the Internet are not therefore happening in the countries where the participants or the servers are physically located, but "in cyberspace".

Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other city. The place between the phones. ...in the past twenty years, this electrical "space," which was once thin and dark and one-dimensional -- little more than a narrow speaking-tube, stretching from phone to phone -- has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in the- box. Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the glowing computer screen. This dark electric netherworld has become a vast flowering electronic landscape. Since the 1960s, the world of the telephone has cross-bred itself with computers and television, and though there is still no substance to cyberspace, nothing you can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.
Cyberspace is like the white triangle in the above image, appearing virtually, existing nowhere, while joining computers, mobile devices or any device that can transmit and receive electronic bits, across the globe


The "space" in cyberspace has more in common with the abstract, mathematical meanings of the term than physical space. It does not have the duality of positive and negative volume, while in physical space for example a room has the negative volume of usable space delineated by positive volume of walls, Internet users cannot enter the screen and explore the unknown part of the Net as an extension of the space they're in, but spatial meaning can be attributed to the relationship between different pages of books as well as web servers, considering the unturned pages to be somewhere "out there." The concept of cyberspace therefore refers not to the content being presented to the surfer, but rather to the possibility of surfing among different sites, with feedback loops between the user and the rest of the system creating the potential to always encounter something unknown or unexpected.

Videogames differ from text-based communication in that on-screen images are meant to be figures that actually occupy a space and the animation shows the movement of those figures. Images are supposed to form the positive volume that delineates the empty space. A game adopts the cyberspace metaphor by engaging more players in the game, and then figuratively representing them on the screen as avatars. Games do not have to stop at the avatar-player level, but current implementations aiming for more immersive playing space (i.e. Laser tag) take the form of augmented reality rather than cyberspace, fully immersive virtual realities remaining impractical.

Some virtual communities explicitly refer to the concept of cyberspace, e.g. Linden Lab calling their customers "Residents" of Second Life, while all such communities can be positioned "in cyberspace" for explanatory and comparative purposes, integrating the metaphor into a wider cyber-culture.

1.2 Cyberspace and Infosphere

Infosphere is a term used since the 1990s to speculate about the common evolution of the Internet, society and culture. It is a neologism composed of information and sphere.

Emerging from what French philosopher-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the shared noosphere of collective human thought, invention and spiritual seeking, the Infosphere is sometimes used to conceptualize a field that engulfs our physical, mental and etheric bodies; it affects our dreaming and our cultural life. Our evolving nervous system has been extended, as media sage Marshall McLuhan predicted in the early 1960s, into a global embrace.

The term was used by Dan Simmons in the science-fiction saga Hyperion (published 1989) to indicate what the Internet could become in the future: a place parallel, virtual, formed of billions of networks, with "artificial life" on various scales, from what is equivalent to an insect (small programs) to what is equivalent to a god (artificial intelligences), whose motivations are divers: to help mankind or on the contrary to harm mankind?

The term has also been used by Luciano Floridi, on the basis of biosphere, to denote the whole informational environment constituted by all informational entities (thus including informational agents as well), their properties, interactions, processes and mutual relations. It is an environment comparable to, but different from cyberspace (which is only one of its sub-regions, as it were), since it also includes off-line and analogue spaces of information. According to Floridi, it is possible to equate the Infosphere to the totality of Being. This equation leads him to an informational ontology.
1.3 Characteristics of Cyberspace
1.3.1The system of cyberspace.

Is cyberspace part of the world Or is it "another world", in the sense of a fourth partition of space? One of the main problems when we try to define cyberspace is whether to consider it a system, a subsystem or a self-referential system, compared to space.

As a system, it would be autonomous from space, which means that, also, it might become a system of places, a group of places linked by mutual relationships, having all the characteristics that this implies. As a subsystem, a system which is part of another, it would become one of the places inside space, but it would remain linked to it, and it could not be considered as a "per se" space. As a self-referential system or "hybrid space", a system which is part of another but only refers to itself and its own variables, it would belong to the main system of space, and claim independence from it at the same time. In this case, the hybrid space would belong to, would be located in, a "metastanding" space (a space which namely belongs to the original space, but has independence in respect to its parent). Cyberspace would claim its own structure construction, which would not have to reflect the one of the original space, but could "reinvent" itself with a new system of metaphors.

The nature of cyberspace seems to lie more on the third definition, of "hybrid" space. Nobody is ready to admit a separate life for cyberspace, a life which would be "detached" and independent from physical space. It still relies on the physics of silicon. On the other hand, as for some commonly accepted descriptions given by VR (Virtual Reality), IRC (Inter Relay Chat) and MUD (Multi User Dungeons) users, cyberspace is a "legitimate" space, in which relationships and communities can develop.

1.3.2 The matter of cyberspace.

As seen above, in the term cyber+space, space assumes the meaning of physical matter, whereas cyber gives it the immaterial characteristic. The term "cyber" comes from "cybernetics", which means "leading, piloting". In the last few years, it assumed a meaning of "that which belongs to the digital world." Moreover, it reaches a point in which it could be assimilated to "virtual." Scholars are ready to agree that cyberspace is not a place for molecular manifestations, in the sense described above. Any phenomenon which takes place is, in fact, a result of electronic transformations of linguistic events.

Which is the "matter" of cyberspace, then? We can find any materiality in cyberspace. The "touchability" is still the main characteristic for defining "physicity" (being molecular). Cyberspace is not a physical space, and its livability is arguable. If we think about livability as "molecular presence", then we can sustain that cyberspace is not livable.

Let us consider different types of space:
Physical space has possibility of action, livability, can host communities and can be organised in spatial sub structures. Its time is irreversible: we do not have control over it; mental space does not have any livability characteristic, neither possibility of action or spatial organisation. Mental space is where intentions are formulated and organised; cyberspace has control over its time, whereas physical space is affected by its irreversibility;

cyberspace is an "actual" zone, activities can take place there, such as exchange of information, modifications of computer generated environments, communities can find ways of aggregation (eg. newsgroups, mailing lists, IRC channels and MUDs, all language-based environments);

communities, intended as groups of people sharing the same interests, as well as actions, are also possible in cyber, physical and social space, whereas mental space is, above all, the space in which the organisation of these communities and actions, and therefore their time, starts being shaped, but still is not produced as modifying action.
We can argue that the matter of cyberspace is language: it is written by it, and it is navigable by it; the navigation tools are nothing else but pieces of software.

The advantage of compiled language is in its global versatility: when compiled and sometimes even when not, such as HyperText Markup Language, it creates information which can be shared, transmitted and interpreted by a large number of computers.

1.4 Different Senses of the word Cyberspace

In one of its senses cyberspace refers to the "spaces" associated with virtual reality, an advanced computer-based technology in which people wear headsets with stereoscopic displays, carry trackers that sense their motion, and use special input devices. With the help of those devices people navigate in "simulated" spaces, typically graphical representations of three-dimensional mathematical spaces. The integrated use of these devices creates an experience of immersion in a "virtual" reality, thus realizing an important aspect of Gibson's vision: that it is possible to enter into cyberspace, leaving the body behind.

In another sense, which became predominant in the mid-1990s, cyberspace refers to the integrated "space" made possible by the Internet, which is populated by large numbers of entities of various kinds and in which people perform multiple activities. Although this space does not support immersion, it brings to life another important ingredient of Gibson's cyberspace: the fact that it is common to all.

In City of Bits, William Mitchell approaches the Internet from the perspective of space and place and suggests that "the worldwide computer network—the electronic agora—subverts, displaces, and radically redefines our notions of gathering place, community, and urban life" (1995, p. 8). Mitchell proposes that the Internet is antispatial in the sense that it is "nowhere in particular but everywhere at once" and that it is noncorporeal because people's identity in it is "electronic" and disembodied. In addition, because of this disembodiment, the constructions others make of people in an effort to give those people an identity are fragmented. Also, the Internet favours asynchronic communication. Increasingly, the word Internet is being invested with a broad meaning to encompass the notion of cyberspace in the second sense discussed above.

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